Buzzword Bingo

I wrote a program to play a version of Bingo with SGI buzzwords. It was later ported by Chris Pirazzi to web format, and he used some of my buzzwords to produce an artificial press release generator. It caught on like wildfire, and eventually made it to the front page of the Wall Street Journal.

Later, Jon Carroll of the San Francisco Chronicle wrote an article about Buzzword Bingo in one of his columns, asking for information about it. I replied, and became famous again. Here is the original article:

Software Usability

In 1993 I wrote an internal memo for Silicon Graphics on
the usability of our software. The memo was highly critical
of certain things. Unfortunately, it was leaked by someone
and had widespread distribution on the web.

Of course marketing was furious -- the competition was showing
it to customers to make them see how shoddy SGI software was.

But what was amazing is the "fan mail" I got in response. There
were dozens of letters, virtually all of which said the same
thing; namely, that the situation was exactly the same, or worse,
where they worked. Somebody said I should make it a template
so you could just replace "SGI" with your company name, and
"IRIX" with your company's software product.

The document was even used in a software engineering course at
Princeton.